Supplementary Information: The Actors of History: Narrative Network Analysis Reveals the Institutions of Power in British Society Between 1800-1950
In this study we analyze a corpus of 35.9 million articles from local British newspapers published between 1800 and 1950, investigating the changing role played by key actors in public life. This involves the role of institutions (such as the Church or Parliament) and individual actors (such as the Monarch). The analysis is performed by transforming the corpus into a narrative network, whose nodes are actors, whose links are actions, and whose communities represent tightly interacting parts of society. We observe how the relative importance of these communities evolves over time, as well as the centrality of various actors. All this provides an automated way to analyze how different actors and institutions shaped public discourse over a time span of 150 years. We discover the role of the Church, Monarchy, Local Government, and the peculiarities of the separation of powers in the United Kingdom. The combination of AI algorithms with tools from the computational social sciences and data-science, is a promising way to address the many open questions of Digital Humanities.
Narrative network for 1800-1810
Nodes: 386
Edges: 298
Narrative network for 1805-1815
Nodes: 417
Edges: 376
Narrative network for 1810-1820
Nodes: 438
Edges: 432
Narrative network for 1815-1825
Nodes: 580
Edges: 585
Narrative network for 1820-1830
Nodes: 834
Edges: 839
Narrative network for 1825-1835
Nodes: 1191
Edges: 1403
Narrative network for 1830-1840
Nodes: 1837
Edges: 2229
Narrative network for 1835-1845
Nodes: 2640
Edges: 3111
Narrative network for 1840-1850
Nodes: 3567
Edges: 4279
Narrative network for 1845-1855
Nodes: 4273
Edges: 5157
Narrative network for 1850-1860
Nodes: 5592
Edges: 7010
Narrative network for 1855-1865
Nodes: 8157
Edges: 11133
Narrative network for 1860-1870
Nodes: 9249
Edges: 13244
Narrative network for 1865-1875
Nodes: 8246
Edges: 11535
Narrative network for 1870-1880
Nodes: 8442
Edges: 12031
Narrative network for 1875-1885
Nodes: 11164
Edges: 17303
Narrative network for 1880-1890
Nodes: 12604
Edges: 20271
Narrative network for 1885-1895
Nodes: 12677
Edges: 19254
Narrative network for 1890-1900
Nodes: 10840
Edges: 15256
Narrative network for 1895-1905
Nodes: 9331
Edges: 13794
Narrative network for 1900-1910
Nodes: 9010
Edges: 13870
Narrative network for 1905-1915
Nodes: 7356
Edges: 10955
Narrative network for 1910-1920
Nodes: 6448
Edges: 9062
Narrative network for 1915-1925
Nodes: 5125
Edges: 6723
Narrative network for 1920-1930
Nodes: 4664
Edges: 5899
Narrative network for 1925-1935
Nodes: 5916
Edges: 7279
Narrative network for 1930-1940
Nodes: 6854
Edges: 8300
Narrative network for 1935-1945
Nodes: 5109
Edges: 5930
Narrative network for 1940-1950
Nodes: 3040
Edges: 3321